A chill wind blows the threatening dark snow-heavy clouds across this winter scene, revealing a crisp bright sky and a flock of birds flying in formation.  To the left of the picture, figures skate on the glassy ice of the frozen river.  A bridge spans the river to where cottages cloaked in snow huddle together in front of a church with a square bell tower, its roof a pyramid of white, stands flanked with snow-dusted trees, their branches bending in the wind.  To the right, a mother and her child walk away from the bridge on the ice, the wind pulling at their garments. In the centre foreground of the picture a boat lies partly submerged in the frozen river, snow drifting lightly over it, and its prow bears the artist’s signature.  The cool silvery-grey of the sky contrasts with the warm earthy tones of the figures and buildings, and the snow on the bridge and cottage roofs has the brownish tints of a day-old snowfall.

The tradition of winter landscape painting in seventeenth-century Holland stemmed from depictions of the four seasons and months of the year, gradually developing into a genre in its own right.  Winters in the Netherlands became noticeably colder from the 1640s onwards, the winters of 1662-3 and 1671-2 being particularly harsh[i].  Reliant on waterways for transport and shipping, the Dutch way of life was considerably affected by these severe winters when the canals might be frozen for as much as five to ten weeks of the year.  Winter landscape paintings not only provided a visual record of the frozen landscape, but also of the activities which were enjoyed at these times: games of kolf, skating and sledging feature prominently and were commercially appealing.  The effect of light on snow and ice enabled an artist to explore different elements of landscape painting, something which fascinated artists like Jan van de Cappelle (1626-1679) and Aert van der Neer (1603-1677), who were celebrated for their winter landscapes. 

The influence of Jan van de Cappelle is clearly reflected in the composition of the present picture. Cappelle’s Winter Scene of 1653 in the Mauritshuis[ii] features an extremely similar cluster of snow-covered cottages and a square church tower nestled beyond a bridge which spans a frozen river, while a spar juts prominently into the composition from the left foreground.  One can therefore speculate that it is a location that was known to both artists and their depictions of it are relatively true to life.  It is a composition that Dubbels returned to several times with slight variations.  Snow covered Village Church by a River, in the Stockholm National Museum[iii] shares almost exactly the same composition as our picture, however, with a different arrangement of figures and a less intense sky. A version of the Stockholm picture exists in Copenhagen[iv], on canvas and of larger dimensions and with a more dramatic sky and greater detail in the background landscape to the left of the composition, although it also lacks the spar in the foreground and the figure crossing the bridge.  Our picture unites all of these various elements and in doing so creates a very particular atmosphere of chill and tension.  One other version[v] of our picture is recorded, on panel although fractionally larger, but, interestingly, bearing the signature “I V C” on the boat, showing how similar were the works of van de Cappelle and Dubbels.

BIOGRAPHY

Hendrick Dubbels was born in Amsterdam, to a diamond cutter, and worked there all his life, gaining a reputation for his paintings of seascapes and winter landscapes.  Primarily a marine artist, his earliest paintings were seascapes in the style of Jan Porcellis (c. 1584-1632), in which he adopted the restricted palette associated with the ‘tonal’ phase of Dutch painting.  However, from c. 1650-1653 he worked in the studio of Simon de Vlieger (c. 1601-1653), where his exposure to Jan van de Cappelle and Willem van de Velde the Younger (1633-1707) benefitted his artistic development.  During the 1650s, he was viewed as one of the leading marine painters in Amsterdam alongside these fellow artists. He painted independently until the late 1660s and, thereafter, in the studio of van de Velde the Younger until van de Velde left for England with his father in 1672-3.  In the latter half of the 1650s, Ludolf Backhuysen (1631-1708) was a pupil of Dubbels and after the emigration of the van de Veldes it is thought that he in turn worked in Backhuysen’s studio.  It is noticeable that many of his later works are in a similar style to that of his one-time student.